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Club Report – Melbourne Storm

The Melbourne Storm were founded in 1998, in the immediate aftermath of the Super League-ARL dispute. Getting a team in Melbourne was a priority for Newscorp in order to expand the footprint of the game.

Early financial concessions meant that the Storm won their first premiership in only their second season in 1999. Thereafter, more sustained success arrived, with three minor premierships in a row from 2006 to 2008, four grand finals in a row from 2006 to 2009 and two premierships in 2007 and 2009. Melbourne, and rivals Manly, were the most dominant teams of this period. It all came apart in 2010 when massive salary cap rorts were uncovered. The Storm were stripped of the minor and major premierships from the 2006 to 2009 period and lost all their competition points in 2010, ensuring the club’s only wooden spoon.

The Storm bounced back quickly, winning a legitimate minor premiership in 2011 and a premiership in 2012. Since then, they’ve kept winning with two more minor premierships in 2016 and 2017. There’s not a lot of superlatives left to describe the Storm – even their cheating was monumental and they’ve had more NRL titles stripped than most clubs have won – and the 2017 team could make an excellent case for being the best vintage produced in the last twenty years.

Class

Using the Eratosthenes system, we measure the long term class – their structural competence – of NRL clubs.

The Melbourne Storm’s current rating is 1659, which is the highest in the league. The Storm have had an average class rating of 1591 since 1998. No one has had a better average rating.

Over the last decade, the Storm’s average rating was 1630. This is also the highest in the league.

Melbourne peaked at a maximum rating of 1696 after round 7, 2013. This is the highest peak of any team, ahead of the Roosters in second who peaked at 1665.

The Storm’s lowest ever rating was 1496, dipping below average at the end of the 2002 season. Brisbane is the only team close to this record, with a rating low of 1491. If we look at just the last ten years, Melbourne’s lowest rating was 1566, a level higher than the best reached by Canberra, Gold Coast, Newcastle, Parramatta, Penrith, New Zealand and Wests over the same period.